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Praxis Series

Romantic Circles
Praxis is a series of peer-reviewed critical volumes devoted to the field of Romanticism and its theoretical underpinnings. Closer in form to a scholarly book of essays than a critical journal, each volume in Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS) explores a particular subject, figure, or theoretical approach, such as the gothic, contemporary culture, discourses of empire, and many others.

Section Editor:

February 2015

The six essays collected here suggest that Romanticism exposes us to a materialism that cannot merely be overcome and an idealism with which it is not identical. By reading beyond the texts conventionally associated with Romanticism, and by recasting the critical tendencies–from thing theory to object oriented ontology–through the poets, genres, and critics of Romanticism, these essays position Romanticism (and show how Romanticism may always have been positioned) in another relation to things as they are–or may be.

December 2014

This volume is dedicated to both excavating the Romantic genealogies of visuality and charting directions for the ways in which the study of Romantic visual culture may redraw the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary bounds of Romanticism, bringing diverse, and in some instances new, objects and their ethical, political, and aesthetic stakes into view. The essays investigate three broad inquiries: 1) technologies of vision and objectivity’s slippages; 2) the indigenous or transplanted fruits of visuality’s New World Genealogies and 3) the role of proto-photography, panopticism, and slavery in the spectral formation of Romantic visuality. Emphasizing the ways we interpret visuality in romantic culture, the volume invites reconsideration of media, practices, and discourses that would seem to belong to earlier and later periods—from the artifacts and modes of viewing attached to curiosity and to technologies and ways of imaging and imagining that have become aligned with photography and the digital. The volume includes an editor's introduction by
Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid, with essays by Sophie Thomas, Marcus Wood, Matthew Francis Rarey, Kay Dian Kriz, and Lucy Kamiko Hawkinson Traverse.

October 2014

This issue takes its inspiration from the writings on translation, tragedy and twentieth-century literary theory in the work of the late Romanticist and comparatist Tom McCall, who died suddenly in January 2011. Three noted Romanticists and literary theorists, taking off from specific critical essays by McCall, explore the centrality of Greek tragedy as it emerges in Romantic writing (especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin), for philosophy, literature, and literary theory. Passing between the Greek and the German (notably in Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles), and between the literary and the philosophical, these papers offer new and original insights into the complex ways in which Romantic writing was bound to the translation and interpretation of Greek writing and the unique manner in which twentienth-century literary theory emerged from the Romantic reflection on the relation between language and the emergence (and suspension) of thought. Edited and introduced by Cathy Caruth, with essays by Cathy Caruth, Ian Balfour, David S. Ferris, and three contributions from Tom McCall (1 |2 |3).

July 2014

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell arrives at the striking conclusion that “romanticism opens with the discovery of the problem of other minds, or with the discovery that the other is a problem, an opening of philosophy.” Cavell’s account of how Romanticism opens is not historical in orientation, but rather offers a rich conceptual, aesthetic, and ethical site of concern that both interrupts and generates his life’s work—thus presenting an opening for scholars and students of the Romantic Period to think the subject of Romanticism anew in studying (with) Cavell. The present collection—with essays (in suggested reading order) by Emily Sun, Paul Fry, Eric Lindstrom, Eric Walker, and Anne-Lise François, and a substantial Afterword by Joshua Wilner—hinges between the efforts to record Cavell’s engagement with British Romantic texts and to stage new interventions.

June 2014

Featuring essays by leading art historians, literary scholars, and historians of antiquarianism, this volume sheds new light on Romanticism's material and visual cultures. Romantic Antiquarianism reveals the important role that antiquarian discourses and practices played in shaping neoclassicism, the sublime, and other major concepts of the Romantic period. Edited and introduced by Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, with essays by Martin Myrone, Jonathan Sachs, Thora Brylowe, Rosemary Hill, Timothy Campbell, Ina Ferris, & Sam Smiles, and a response by Jonah Siegel.

January 2014

In the interview that comprises this volume, Anne Mellor recounts her determined commitment to rethinking Romanticism through the lens of gender. On the eve of retirement, Mellor continues to query our assumptions and preoccupations as Romanticists, even as she looks back on her long career. The audio clips attached to the transcription resonate with Mellor’s intellectual curiosity, as her voice continues to prompt the reader to return to the texts, the archives, and the critical concerns of Feminist Romanticism. Roxanne Eberle introduces the volume and conducts the interview.

April 2013

The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume’s title. This volume explores older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable); they register as well an upsurge in interest in formal-language, neurocognitive and medial-historical approaches. These essays invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.
Edited and introduced by Maureen N. McLane, with essays by
Matthew F. Wickman,
Marjorie Levinson,
James Brooke-Smith,
John Savarese,
Bo Earle, and
Ron Broglio, along with two responses by Maureen N. McLane:
Response #1, Response #2.

December 2012

This collection of articles is intended to initiate a conversation about and between biopolitics and romanticism. Its broad contention is that the study of biopolitics reanimates the question of romanticism in two senses. First, the set of conceptual resources provided in recent work on biopolitics opens up inventive lines of inquiry that enable scholars to re-think the already established awareness that the literature, philosophy, and culture of romanticism displays an obsession with life. In another sense biopolitics reanimates romanticism insofar as the current scholarly concern with life as an object of power marks the radical survival of romanticism. If romanticism responds well when examined in the light of contemporary biopolitical theory, then a constitutive part of this response is a certain resistance to biopolitical theory.
The contributors to this volume demonstrate that the biopolitical intervention on life engages paradoxes, predicaments, and aporias that have been widely or fully appreciated neither by theorists of biopolitics nor by critics who take up their work. Romanticism, we suggest, is a privileged locus for the awareness that even the most assured representation of life turns upon an irreducible “literariness.”
Edited and introduced by Alastair Hunt and Matthias Rudolf, with essays by
Marc Redfield,
Emily Sun, and
Sara Guyer, along with a response by Eva Geulen.

February 2012

The aim of this volume is to explore the Romantic credit crisis of 1797-1821. The decision to end cash payments and flood the economy with low denominational banknotes led to a spectacular increase in executions for banknote forgery. Many Romantic writers saw this bloody debacle as a sensational illustration of the dangers of an economic system based on mere "paper" value. While some critical attention has been given to the cultural history of credit (Brantlinger, Poovey), the issue of forgery has been overlooked. Yet, as the essays in this volume show, the impact of the credit crisis and its thousands of victims affected literature, journalism and art in often profound ways. Ian Haywood edits and contributes to the volume, along with
Robert Miles,
Alex Benchimol,
Alex J. Dick, and
Nick Groom.

January 2012

Robert Bloomfield's letters document one artist’s struggles (and sometimes his victories) to share his unique voice and vision; the online publication of his extant letters (a companion to this collection of essays) reveals new and exciting insights into Bloomfield the artist and the man. The essays included in this collection highlight and draw attention to aspects of Bloomfield's literary production that would likely not be possible without the full access to his letters that the edition provides, and make a strong case for why Bloomfield continues to be worthy of study. They suggest how much more remains to be said about this prolific poet. This volume is
edited and introduced by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, with essays by
Tim Fulford,
Peter Denney,
Ian Haywood, and
Bridget Keegan.

Romanticism and Disaster considers and responds to the timely
concept of devastated life by thinking about how the capacity to read,
interpret, and absorb disaster necessitates significant changes in
theory, ethics, and common life. What if the consequences or
"experience" of a disaster were less about psychic survival than an
unblinking desire to face down the disaster as a challenge to
normative structures? The essays in this volume attend to the
rhetorical, epistemological, political, and social effects of romantic
critique, and reflect on how processes of destruction and
reconstitution, ruination and survival, are part and parcel of
romanticism's grappling with a negativity that haunts its corners. Put
in this way, "disaster" does not signal a referential event, but
rather an undoing of certain apparently prior categories of dwelling,
and forces us to contemplate living otherwise. In confronting the end
of things, what are the conditions or possibilities of existence
amidst catastrophe? What is a crisis, and what kinds of challenges
does it occasion? What can be philosophically gained or lost by
analyzing disaster in its multiple sites, contexts, and instances? This volume is
edited and introduced by Jacques Khalip and David Collings, with essays by
Scott J. Juengel,
William Keach,
Timothy Morton, and
Rei Terada.

October 2011

This Romantic Circles Praxis Volume moves the perspective of critical inquiry into British Romanticism from the Island (England) to the Islands (West Indies), considering the particular significance of the Atlantic—watery vortex of myriad economic and cultural exchanges, roaring multiplicity of agencies, and vast whirlpool of creative powers. Black Romanticism remembers a forgotten ancestry of British culture, recovering the vital agencies of diasporic Africans and creole cultures of the West Indies. It does so by practicing counter-literacy, reading the works of nation, empire, and colony against themselves to liberate the common cultures they occlude. The five essays presented here examine texts by or about Jean Jacque Dessalines, Juan Manzano, Jack Mansong, Mary Prince, and John Gabriel Stedman, following a circuitous route that begins in Africa and travels from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Suriname, Bermuda, and Antigua to corresponding points in England, America, and the continent. The circulation of radically different adaptations of the “same” material provides new ways to understand the colonial Caribbean. This volume is
edited and introduced by Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin, with essays by
Lindsay J. Twa,
Lissette Lopez Szwydky,
Joselyn Almeida,
Dustin Kennedy, and
Michele Speitz.

September 2011

Capitalizing on the conjunction of renewed scholarly interest in Thelwall and new archival finds, this collection of essays addresses the central question of the coherence and continuity of Thelwall's diverse pursuits—literary, political, scientific, therapeutic, elocutionary, and journalistic—across the four decades of his career (c. 1790-1830), and provides new insight into Thelwall's eclipse and persistence in the nineteenth century.
The volume includes an introduction by Yasmin Solomonescu and essays by Nicholas Roe, Mary Fairclough, Molly Desjardins, Emily Stanback, Steve Poole, Angela Esterhammer, and Patty O'Boyle.

The essays in Romantic Frictions find in Romanticism what philosophical modernity has often found there: a disposition to recognize oppositions that cannot be squared or resolved precisely because they constitute the ongoing work of culture and writing. Such frictions are embedded in a shifting temporal moment whose inner complexity is similarly textured such that neither history nor philosophy assumes a master (and fictional) disguise. Both are instead crosscut and assembled in ways that sustain an inner friction that invites being read. Rather than reify the critical tendency, stubbornly at issue since the 1980s, to suppose that Romanticism belongs either to deconstructive philosophy or to new historicism, the essays in this volume understand romanticism as a cultural and literary terrain where these and other disciplinary affiliations exist together, not as easy companions but as productive antagonists.
This volume is edited and introduced by Theresa M. Kelley, with essays by Ian Duncan, Mary A. Favret, Daniel O'Quinn, Matthew Rowlinson, Colin Jager, and Jacques Khalip.

April 2011

Romantic-era fans collected autographs, souvenirs, portraits and relics of celebrity writers, artists, performers and athletes; pored over gossip-filled periodicals and newspaper notices; imitated celebrities' fashion statements; fantasized about becoming friends or lovers with celebrities; got caught up in "crazes" for persons and texts; created fan fiction, wrote fan mail and formed communities of like-minded devotees. Analyzing fan practices across a range of cultural contexts, the essays in this volume will explore how the concept of "fandom" can help us make sense of the role of various audiences in the cultural activity and cultural productions of the Romantic period.
The volume includes an introduction by Eric Eisner and essays by Nicola J. Watson, Clara Tuite, Mark Schoenfield, and David A. Brewer.

September 2010

This volume looks at the
profound challenges William Blake poses to both
editors and readers. Despite the promises of the
current multi-modal environment, the effort to
represent Blake's works as he intended them to be
read is increasingly being recognized as an editorial
fantasy. All editorial work necessitates mediation
and misrepresentation. Yet editorial work also
illuminates much in Blake's corpus, and more
remains to be done. The essays in this volume grapple
with past, present, and future attempts at editing
Blake's idiosyncratic verbal and visual work for
a wide variety of audiences who will read Blake using
numerous forms of media. This volume is edited by
Wayne C. Ripley and Justin
Van Kleeck. It includes an editor's
introduction by Wayne
C. Ripley, with essays by David Fuller,
W.
H. Stevenson, Mary Lynn
Johnson, Rachel Lee
and J. Alexandra McGhee, Justin Van
Kleeck, and Wayne C.
Ripley.

August 2010

This volume offers a series
of essays in which contributors meditate on how the
concept of education intersects with sublime theory
and Romantic aesthetics more generally. Broadly
speaking, this volume produces a set of revisionary
readings rooted in the critical philosophy of
Immanuel Kant and its place in our ongoing
understanding of Romantic aesthetics and sublime
theory. An underlying inspiration of this volume is
the pedagogical theory of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
who has thought widely about humanities-based
training using Romantic-era texts as principal
theoretical and literary tools, formative among them
the aesthetic philosophy of Kant. This volume is
edited and introduced by J. Jennifer
Jones, with essays by Christopher
Braider, Frances
Ferguson, Paul
Hamilton, Anne C.
McCarthy, Forest Pyle,
Deborah
Elise White, and an afterword by Ian
Balfour.

December 2008

This volume offers a series
of shifting perspectives on the emergence of
psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytical consciousness
in early and later British and German Romantic
poetry, fiction, philosophy, and science. Rather than
read psychoanalysis as one of Romanticism's
inevitable outcomes, this volume reads for what
remains unthought between Romantic thought and
contemporary theory and criticism about Romanticism
and psychoanalysis. The papers herein map versions of
a psychoanalysis avant la lettre, but more
crucially these essays imagine how psychoanalysis
before Freud thinks itself differently, as well as
anticipating and staging its later concerns,
theorizations, and institutionalizations. Together
they offer what might be called the profoundly
psychosomatic matrix within which the specters of
modern subjectivity materialize themselves. This
volume is edited and introduced by Joel
Faflak, with essays byMatt
ffytche, Ildiko
Csengei, Julie
Carlson, Mary
Jacobus, Ross
Woodman, and Tilottama
Rajan.

August 2008

This volume begins to
unpack the relationships among the three terms of its
title. Despite its air of neutrality,
"secularism" is increasingly understood to
have its own interests, particularly when it comes to
defining and managing the "religious." And,
thanks to its constitutive relationship to modernity,
romanticism is invested in secularism, not least in
those moments typically coded as
"spiritual" or "religious."
Cosmopolitanism, too, bears a vexed relationship to a
period typically associated with nationalism.
Finally, secularism and cosmopolitanism are
themselves related in surprising ways, both
historically and conceptually. Do they pursue the
same project? Do they diverge? How and when? And how
does romantic writing figure such alignments? These
are the questions motivating the three essays in this
volume. This volume is edited and introduced
by Colin
Jager, with essays byMark
Canuel, Colin Jager,
Paul
Hamilton, and an afterword byBruce
Robbins.

July 2008

This volume contextualizes
work by and work about Joanna Baillie with respect to
revisionist thinking about utopianism. Since
utopianism has become a positively valued concept
within sociological, legal, and other fields, its
implications for an understanding of Baillie's
approach to social change/social problems, as well as
for an understanding of scholarship recovering
Baillie for contemporary purposes, deserve to be
explored. This volume is edited and
introduced by Regina
Hewitt, with essays byThomas
McLean, Robert C.
Hale, William
D. Brewer, Marjean D.
Purinton, and Regina
Hewitt.

June 2008

This volume addresses a
perceived opposition between philosophy and critical
theory on the one hand, and culture or cultural
studies on the other. It seeks to revalidate critical
work that develops a philosophy of culture and a
culturally historical philosophy. This volume is
edited and introduced by Rei
Terada, with essays byManu
Chander, Ted
Underwood, Thomas Pfau, J. Hillis Miller,
and Daniel
Tiffany.

April 2008

This forum attends to the sounding
sense of Romantic poetry, both thematically (a
poetics of sound) and sensually/phonically (the
poetry of sound and the sound of poetry). This volume
is edited and introduced by Susan J. Wolfson,
with essays bySusan J.
Wolfson, James
Chandler, Garrett Stewart,
and Adam
Potkay.

January 2007

This volume suggests the myriad ways in which the
surprisingly neglected (and critically undigested)
Romantic culture of gastronomy influenced artistic
production of nineteenth-century Britain and
France-at the same time as it raised new
philosophical challenges. Edited and
introduction byDenise
Gigante, this volume includes essays
byCarolyn
Korsmeyer, Joshua
Wilner, and Michael
Garval.